RUTHFULLY YOURS

With Europe weak and distracted, only the U.S. can thwart the Kremlin’s growing ambitions.

The heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine this week isn’t the only reason to be skeptical about the prospects for the peace summit that began Wednesday in Minsk, Belarus. Even if the meeting among Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Puti n, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande produces a cease-fire agreement that holds up—unlike the one signed last fall—the conflict’s underlying reality will remain unchanged: The Russian-backed separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine is part of Moscow’s larger grand strategy.

President Putin, who is consumed by historical humiliations, knows that Russia was invaded not only by Napoleon and Hitler, but before that also by the Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians. And so the Russian president seeks a post-Warsaw Pact buffer zone in Central and Eastern Europe. The Kremlin play book: imperialism by way of forcing energy dependence, intelligence operations, criminal rackets, buying infrastructure and media through third parties, the bribing of local politicians and playing off the insecurities of ethnic minorities.

Jenny McCarthy knows the credibility of science is a house of cards.

An important question that emerges from the rise of the vaccine doubter movement is by what process of persuasion did so many people come to believe what they do about vaccination? They believe the risks of vaccination are much greater than the risk of the diseases it is supposed to prevent.

Life without serious disease for the majority is now taken for granted as the natural order. The young don’t sign up for health insurance because they don’t need it.

Forgotten over time is the extraordinary human effort and intelligence that produced the good life today. The young women turning against vaccination, a decision that potentially imperils the lives of others in their communities, have mothers or grandmothers with personal experience of the last great pre-vaccine disease, which was polio

PBS may also be charged with having broadcast religious propaganda in place of balanced educational, instructional, and public information material, despite elaborate claims to the contrary.

The Muslim Brotherhood, in a 1991 memoir, spoke of its “work in America as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

The role played by radical individuals in a PBS broadcast and website raises many serious questions, not just for the trustees of PBS, but for national agencies responsible for accuracy in the U.S. media.

If PBS does not publicly correct this confusion and revoke its association with the project, may we not ask just how trusted — and publicly financed — this outlet should really be?

For more than ten years, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut has singled out America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as the country’s most trusted public institution. A 2012 poll for PBS, carried out by independent survey consultants Harris Interactive and ORC Online Caravan found that public trust in PBS (at 26%) was far higher than in any other U.S. institution, such as the courts of law (13%), newspapers (6%), the Federal government (5%) or Congress (4%). That these figures have been consistent for so many years, would seem a strong indicator of PBS’s publicly funded role at the heart of America’s democracy. Almost 90% of US households with televisions watch PBS.

The Oscar worth direction of Iran’s image-laundering campaign is drowning, as hoped by the Obama administration and Tehran, in media headlines about the “new” evidence of Saudi funding of al Qaeda.

Documentation of the Desert Kingdom and its royals’ support of al Qaeda have been evident for years. However, Moussaoui allegations that the Saudi Royals funded al Qaeda, have “shocked shocked” the American media.

The Saudis should have been held accountable for supporting al Qaeda and other jihadist groups and for funding madrassas, mosques and Imams to spread globally the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, much before the 9/11 attacks. However, political considerations prevented U.S. courts from prosecuting them, until now.

Court rules that Austrian hair stylist’s anti-Semitic Facebook posts
are a legitimate way to criticize Israel.

BERLIN – Facebook postings from a Turkish man showing Adolf Hitler,
with a statement praising the death of Jews, are a legitimate
expression of criticizing the Jewish state, the spokesman for the
prosecutor office in the city of Linz, Philip Christl, said on
Tuesday.

In a dramatic turnaround, Philadelphia City Councilwoman denounces terrorist glorifications by Palestinian governor mistakenly honored.

The Philadelphia City Council recently presented the first woman governor of Ramallah with two of its highest honors.

Philadelphia City Councilwoman Maria Quiñones Sanchez gave the Citation of Honor and a replica of the Liberty Bell to Dr. Laila Ghannam, governor of Ramallah, on Jan. 30, 2015.

But unbeknownst to Quiñones Sanchez, Ghannam has honored, extolled and glorified dozens of Palestinian Arab murderers of hundreds of Israelis, including dozens of children, as well as men who tortured and murdered American diplomats.

Mid-afternoon Israel time, the Palestinian Media Watch released a detailed and documented dispatch cataloguing the many different occasions on which Ghannam expressed admiration for brutal terrorists.

Upon receipt and review of the information provided by PMW, Quiñones Sanchez issued a complete denunciation of the sentiments expressed by Ghannam. Quinoñes Sanches stated that she “has consistently condemned terrorist violence.”

If the polls are correct, Israelis are divided more or less half for the Left and half for the Right onto the elections in March for a new government.

Am I reading this correctly, or is this a joke? The delusional Left has numbers and a big following?

The people who produce Einsteins rarely seem to get it right on politics and self-preservation.

You, Dear Israel, cannot be serious about handing the country over to politicians whose platform begins with giving away Jewish territory.

How is it that so many Israelis are so ready to give…give…give? Arab leaders are not even taking. They don’t want the Land parceled out piece by piece. They want the whole package. This includes everything and everybody, even you, yes you sipping hafuch on Dizengoff Street.

“The Duffel Blog,” the best source for military satire these days, headlined a story on Groundhog Day reporting that Punxatawney Phil had seen his shadow and thus predicted ten more years of war.

In Easter Europe, the Middle East and in too many other places, that prediction is going to come true thanks to people such as Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Spring will soon come to Europe. In anticipation of it the “little green men” – Russian troops disguised as insurgents – have renewed Vladimir Putin’s campaign to conquer the rest of Ukraine.

Putin’s so-called “hybrid war” is not a new strategy or even a new tactic. As Sun Tzu wrote about 2300 years ago, deception is always a part of war and disguising troops as civilians, rebels or otherwise is as old as warfare. Whether it’s Russian troops whose insignia have been torn from their uniforms or terrorists wearing civilian clothes, aggressors’ intentions are the same.

Arrogant statism of global warming fanatics Global warming may well be real. But climate alarmists, and especially those who follow their agenda, are filled with arrogance and hubris and they have immense power to cause damage

I’m a firm believer in climate change. Heck, there have been several ice ages and warming periods, so it’s obvious that temperatures shift over time.

And while I’m not particularly qualified to assess such matters, I’m also willing to believe that human activity has an effect on climate.

Moreover, even though I much prefer warm weather, I’m also open to the idea that global warming might be a bad thing that requires some action.

But here’s the catch. I don’t trust radical environmentalists. Simply stated, too many of these people are nuts.
• Environmentalists assert that you’re racist if you oppose their agenda.
• Some environmentalists don’t believe in bathing.
• How about the environmentalists who sterilize themselves to avoid carbon-producing children?
• Or consider the environmentalists who produce/use hand-cranked vibrators to reduce their carbon footprint.
• There are also environmentalist who claim that climate change causes AIDS.
• And environmentalists put together a ranking implying that Cuba is better than the United States.

Early on Tuesday, apropos their exclusive tongue-bath of the President, one of the Obama pajama boys over at Vox.com Tweeted :

11K words from Obama on his worldview and all DC can talk about is an obviously accidental micro-gaffe. This is why everyone hates DC press.

The “obviously accidental micro-gaffe” was the President’s off-the-cuff observations about the alleged “over-playing” of terrorism when it’s just a low-level law-enforcement question about how to deal with “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”.

Well, we can all say carelessly formulated things when we’re off the prompter, particularly when lulled by a sycophantic interviewer. So I suppose it was just about possible that this was indeed “an obviously accidental micro-gaffe” by Obama. Except that, as The Washington Free Beacon pointed out, the Government of the United States spent much of the day insisting that the President meant every word he said. From Josh Earnest’s White House press conference: